Shazam Raises $40 Million, Continues on Path to IPO

Shazam, the company behind the popular music discovery app of the same name, has raised another $40 million to accelerate growth before ultimately going public.

The round of funding announced Monday comes from America Movil, the phone carrier owned by Carlos Slim, formerly the richest man in the world. In addition to the funding, Shazam will enter into a business partnership with America Movil, presumably bringing its media products to the carrier’s subscribers and boosting its user base in the process.

As part of the funding announcement, Shazam revealed it now has more than 350 million users, more than twice what it had two years ago, and 70 million monthly active users, up from 22 million two years ago. Part of the goal for the new funding is simply to invest in the infrastructure to support that growth.

“We are growing incredibly quickly. Part of our need is just to buy capacity to support this on ramp of users and people spending more time on the service,” Andrew Fisher, executive chairman of Shazam, told Mashable in an interview. “The second part is to innovate faster.”

Shazam is focused on innovating its music product — with plans to introduce some notable updates in the coming months — and its television product, which can help viewers discover additional information about ads and programs playing on the screen.

“We’re focused on this category that we describe as media engagement,” Fisher says. “Applying emerging technologies like audio recognition — and potentially image recognition — make it as easy as possible for people to engage with the media and brands they’re interested in.”

While some startups turn to large funding rounds to delay or avoid going public, Fisher says the timetable for Shazam’s IPO has not changed — though he won’t get much more specific.

“It certainly will not be 2013. It will be looking out from there,” he says. “Shazam needs to get through another phase of growth before we are ready to go on the public markets.”

Shazam was founded in 2000 and has raised $75 million in funding to date.